Contents
Organisational Behaviour
Rationale
Organizational Studies, Organizational Behavior1, and Organizational Theory are related terms for the academic study of organizations, examining them using the methods of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology. Related practical disciplines include human resources (HR) and industrial and organizational psychology.
Robbins, Stephen P. Organizational Behavior - Concepts, Controversies, Applications. 4th Ed. Prentice Hall (2004) ISBN 0-13-170901-1. Weick, Karl E. The Social Psychology of Organizing 2nd Ed. McGraw Hill (1979) ISBN 0-07-554808-9. Simon, Herbert A. Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Admini |
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This course is scheduled for one semester and provides students with a basic understanding of how organisations work.
Topics covered include
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After taking this course, students should have an appreciation for the way in which these organisational elements interrelate and work together to maintain a functioning organisation. This understanding should help students to approach their careers in a more strategic way.
Because teams are so important in organisations today, an essential part of this course is to provide students with hands-on experience working in teams. Employers say this is a crucial job skill that they are actively looking for in new hires. The course uses an innovative system of permanent teams that compete for bonus points to give students the opportunity to practice team skills and reflect on team processes. The course structure also provides valuable opportunities for students to practice leadership and negotiation skills - all in a context in which mistakes do not have far-reaching consequences (as they might in a work setting).
The other set of skills that are incredibly important today are computer communication skills. This course depends heavily on the Internet, both in the sense that all the handouts, schedules, and other course materials are posted on the web, and in the sense that class discussion via an email listserv is a course requirement.
When you finish this course, you will know a great deal about how organisations work, how to survive teams, and you will be utterly comfortable with email and the world wide web.
Learning Outcomes
After successful completion of this course, students will be able to
- Explain organisation theory to the management of workplaces.
- Apply organisation theory to the management of workplaces
- Explain and apply principles of group dynamics to the management of workplaces.
- Explain and apply principles of motivation theory to the management of workplaces
- Explain and apply principles of managerial leadership to the management of workplaces.
Today's Videos
- Connect with us on http://www.youtube.com/finntrack
- Google's Playlists
Assignments
There are two major tests: a coursework assignment and an exam. The coursework assignment is mostly multiple choice or a report based on a historical case study and is worth 30% of your grade. The exam, also largely multiple choice or a case report, is worth 55%. The remaining 15% will be collected from the exercises and in-class participation. The rationale here is that, at the beginning of the semester, students are still getting used to the course and what is expected of them, but by the end of the course, everyone understands the course and is ready to be tested on all they have learned.
Teaching and Learning Resources
Overview of the module: mechanics. Overview of the field. What is an organisation? Division of labour. Specialisation. Co-ordination. Departmentation.
An Organization or Organisation (read more about -ize vs -ise) is a formal group of people with one or more shared goals. The word itself is derived from the Greek word ὄργανον (organon) meaning tool. The term is used in both daily and scientific English in multiple ways.
In the social sciences, organizations are studied by researchers from several disciplines. Most commonly in sociology, economics, political science, psychology, and management. The broad area is commonly referred to as organizational studies, organizational behaviour or organization analysis. Therefore, a number of different theories and perspectives exist, some of which are compatible, and others that are competing.
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Organization – process-related: an entity is being (re-)organized (organization as task or action). Organization – functional: organization as a function of how entities like businesses or state authorities are used (organization as a permanent structure). Organization – institutional: an entity is an organization (organization as an actual purposeful structure within a social context) |
- Organization in sociology
- Organizations in virtual worlds
- Organization in management and organizational studies
- Organization theories
- Weberian organization theory (refer to Max Weber's chapter on Bureaucracy in his book 'Economy and Society')
- Marxist organization analysis
- Scientific management (mainly following Frederick W. Taylor)
- Human Relations Studies (going back to the Hawthorne studies, Maslow and Hertzberg)
- Administrative theories (with work by e.g. Henri Fayol and Chester Barnard)
- Contingency theory
- New institutionalism and new institutional economics
- Network analysis
- Economic sociology
- Organization ecology (or demography of organizations)
- Transaction cost economics
- Agency theory (sometimes called principal - agent theory)
- Studies of organization culture
- Labour Process Theory
- Critical Management Studies
- Complexity Theory and Organizations
- Transaction cost theory/Transaction cost Economics (TCE)
- Garbage can model
- Actor-Network Theory and the 'Montreal School'
- Organizational structures
- Pyramids or hierarchies
- Committees or juries
- Staff organization or cross-functional team
- Matrix organization
- Ecologies
- "Chaordic" organizations
- Links to other Wikipedia articles
- Affinity group
- Bureaucracy
- Business organization
- Charitable trust
- Coalition
- Collective
- International organization
- Mutual organization
- Non-governmental organization
- Organizational development
- Organization studies
- Pacifist organization
- Requisite organization
- Service organization
- Size of groups, organizations, and communities
- Strategic Management
- Strategic Organization
- Terrorist organizations
- Virtual organization
- Voluntary association
- Related lists
- References
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Exercises |
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Leadership. Co-ordination,
Group Decisions, Group Processes. Communication
structure; network analysis: centrality. Challenger disaster;
power; groupthink; good voting systems. Perception, influence,
decision making, structure: Group issues. Introduction to
action inquiry.
Tutorials
Readings
Group Dynamics is the field of study within the social sciences that focuses on the nature of groups. Urges to belong or to identify may make for distinctly different attitudes (recognized or unrecognized) than in one-on-one interaction, and the influence of a group may rapidly become strong, influencing or overwhelming individual proclivities and actions. The group dynamics may also include changes in behaviour of a person when he is represented before a group, the behavioural pattern of a person vis-a-vis group. Interaction may differ depending on individuals' current or prospective connections to a sociological group.
Group dynamics form a basis for group therapy. Politicians and salesmen may make practical exploitations of principles of group dynamics for their own ends. Increasingly, group dynamics are becoming of particular interest because of online, social interaction made possible by the internet.
Kurt Lewin (1943, 1948, 1951) is commonly identified as the founder of the movement to study groups scientifically. He coined the term group dynamics to describe the way groups and individuals act and react to changing circumstances.
William Schutz (1958, 1966) looked at interpersonal relations from the perspective of three dimensions: Inclusion, control, and affection. This became the basis for a theory of group behavior that see groups as resolving issues in each of these stages in order to be able to develop to the next stage. Conversely, a group may also devolve to an earlier stage if unable to resolve outstanding issues in a particular stage.
Wilfred Bion (1961) studied group dynamics from a psychoanalytic perspective. Many of his findings were reported in his published books, especially Experiences in Groups. The Tavistock Institute has further developed and applied the theory and practices developed by Bion.
Bruce Tuckman (1965) proposed the 4-stage model called Tuckman's Stages for a group. Tuckman's model states that the ideal group decision making process should occur in four stages:
- Forming (pretending to get on or get along with others);
- Storming (letting down the politeness barrier and trying to get down to the issues even if tempers flare up );
- Norming (getting used to each other and developing trust and productivity);
- Performing (working in a group to a common goal on a highly efficient and cooperative basis).
It should be noted that this model refers to the overall pattern of the group, but of course individuals within a group work in different ways. If distrust persists, a group may never even get to the norming stage.
Looked at for larger-scale groups, Tuckman's stages of group development are similar to those developed by M. Scott Peck and set out in his (1987) book, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace. Peck describes the stages of a community as:
- Pseudo-community
- Chaos
- Emptiness
- True Community
Communities may be distinguished from other types of groups, in Peck's view, by the need for members to eliminate barriers to communication in order to be able to form true community. Examples of common barriers are: expectations and preconceptions; prejudices; ideology, theology and solutions; the need to heal, convert, fix or solve and the need to control. A community is born when its members reach a stage of "emptiness" or peace (Peck: 95-103).
See also
- Crowd psychology
- Facilitator
- Forming-storming-norming-performing
- Group-dynamic games
- Groupthink
- Group process
- Interpersonal relationships
- Small group
- Talking circle
- Cog's Ladder
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External links |
The word Leadership can refer to:
- the process of leading
- the concept of leading
- those entities that perform one or more acts of leading.
The various meanings can lead to some confusion.
- Terminology, usage and conceptual scope
- Categories and types of leadership
- The psychology of leadership
- Leadership associated with positions of authority
- Leadership amongst primates
- Leadership as a vanguard
- Scope of leadership
- Orthogonality and leadership
- Support-structures for leadership
- Determining what makes "effective leadership"
- Leadership and vision
- Leadership's relation with management
- Leadership by a group
- Leader relationships with followers
- Historical views on leadership
- Specific theories of leadership
- Alternatives to leadership
Exercise
Formal and Informal Organisations. Bureaucracy. Hawthorne studies; Human Relations School
Tutorials
Readings
Bureaucracy is a concept in sociology and political science referring to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules are socially organized. This office organization is characterized by standardized procedure (rule-following), formal division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships.
Examples of everyday bureaucracies include governments, armed forces, corporations, hospitals, courts, ministries and schools.
- Origin of the concept
- Karl Marx and bureaucracy
- Max Weber on bureaucracy
- Austrian School Analysis of Bureaucracy
- Current Debates
- Abilene Paradox
- Parkinson's law
- Peter principle
- Red tape
- Yes Minister
- Sonatine Bureaucratique
- Street-level bureaucracy
- Hermes Conrad
- Sources
- References
- External links
New Forms of Organisation. Trends in Organisational Structure.
Tutorials
Readings
Organizational Structure is the way in which the interrelated groups of an organization are constructed. From a managerial point of view the main concerns are ensuring effective communication and coordination.
External links
Exercise
Culture and Decision Making. Organisational culture; sense-making. Intangible forms of capital. How people think; bounded rationality & garbage can model. Decision making: Carter racing case.
Tutorials
Readings
Organizational Culture, or corporate culture, comprises the attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values of an organization.
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It has been defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization. Organizational values are beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organizational members should use to achieve these goals. From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another." (Hill & Jones, 2001) Senior management may try to determine a corporate culture. They may wish to impose corporate values and standards of behavior that specifically reflect the objectives of the organization. In addition, there will also be an extant internal culture within the workforce.
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Work-groups within the organization have their own behavioral quirks and interactions which, to an extent, affect the whole system. Task culture can be imported. For example, computer technicians will have expertise, language and behaviors gained independently of the organization, but their presence can influence the culture of the organization as a whole.
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Exercises
Action Inquiry. Knowledge Management: Principles of action inquiry. Knowledge flow; absorptive capacity; organisational learning; transactive knowledge; communities of practice.
Readings
Action research is research that each of us can do on our own practice, that “we” (any team or family or informal community of practice) can do to improve its practice, or that larger organizations or institutions can conduct on themselves, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice.
Kurt Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term “action research” in his 1946 paper “Action Research and Minority Problems”. In that paper, he described action research as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action”.
Action research is not only a research that describes how humans and organizations behave in the outside world but also a change mechanism that helps human and organizations reflect on and change their own systems (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). After six decades of action research development, many methodologies have been evolved, ranging:
1. from those that are more driven by the researcher’s agenda to those more driven by participants;
2. from those that are motivated primarily by instrumental goal attainment to those motivated primarily by the aim of personal, organizational, or societal transformation; and
3. from 1st-, to 2nd-, to 3rd-person research (i.e. my research on my own action, aimed primarily at personal change; our research on our group (family/team), aimed primarily at improving the group; and ‘scholarly’ research aimed primarily at theoretical generalization and/or large scale change).
Action research can change the entire sense of social science, transforming it from reflective knowledge about past social practices formulated by a priesthood of experts (research PhDs) to an active moment-to-moment theorizing, data collecting, and inquiring occurring in the midst of our ongoing lives. “Knowledge is always gained through action and for action. From this starting point, to question the validity of social knowledge is to question, not how to develop a reflective science about action, but how to develop genuinely well-informed action—how to conduct an action science” (Torbert 2001).
Four major action research theories are:
- Chris Argyris's Action Science
- John Heron and Peter Reason's Cooperative Inquiry
- Paulo Freire's Participatory Action Research (PAR)
- William Torbert’s Developmental Action Inquiry
Argyris’ action science invites individuals to study themselves in action with others, and simultaneously attempts to contribute to and transform the practice of social science itself. Therefore, it is primarily a 1st-person approach, learned in 2nd-person settings, but with implications for 3rd-person social science theory and method that Argyris (1970, 1980) has strongly articulated.
Heron’s (1996)and Reason’s (1995) Cooperative Inquiry brings peers (e.g. doctors, social workers, young women managers, men) together in self-study groups. Thus, it is primarily a 2nd-person approach, though group participants are also encouraged to try 1st-person action research outside the groups, and Reason has played a central role in mounting a paradigm challenge to ‘naively objective’ modernist social science.
The Participatory Action Research approach of Freire (1970) and others, primarily in the southern hemisphere, concerns empowering the poorest and least educated members of society for literacy, for land reform analyses, and for community. Hence, this approach is primarily 3rd-person in the scope of its intended societal transformations.
The Developmental Action Inquiry approach of Torbert & Associates (2004) attempts to interweave individual, 1st-person self-study with face-to-face 2nd-person self-study by teams and with 3rd-person institution-wide self-study.
Since action research is as much about creating a better life within more effective and just social contexts as it is about discovering true facts and theories, it should not be surprising that it has flourished in Latin America, Northern Europe, India, and Australia as much or more than within university scholarship in the US.
See also
- Appreciative Inquiry Research
- Participatory video a powerful tool for action research
External links
- Action science history
- Parts of Speech
- Notes on Transactive Knowledge
- Knowledge Networks
- More on Kevin Bacon
- Communities of Practice
- Accompanying
Vignette
AI & Strategy
- Nick Heap offers an outline of a one-day Appreciative approach to Strategy. If runs through the whole 4D process in a very simple way.
- JP Consultants offer a brief account of an Appreciative intervention they made to help the Muncie Children's Museum develop their strategy.
Social Capital: Individual level social capital; centrality.
Tutorials
Readings
Social capital is a sociological concept, which refers to connections within and between social networks. Though there are a variety of related definitions, which have been described as "something of a cure-all"[1] for the problems of modern society, they tend to share the core idea "that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so do social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups".[2]
- The Social Capital Foundation, Patrick Hunout
- Social Capital Gateway, Resources for the study of social capital
- Social capital tool by Martin Gargiulo INSEAD Faculty, Identifying patterns in your network.
- Social Capital Theory - Detailed review of social capital, particularly social capital for social action.
- The Saguaro Seminar's "Primer on Social Capital"
- World Bank's PovertyNet page on social capital
- Lin N., 2001, Building a Network Theory of Social Capital
- Social Capital Inc., an organization dedicated to increasing social capital in local communities
- New Papers on Social Capital, a Newsletter edited by the RePEc Project
- Social Capital & Collective Intelligence Forum at openbc — moderated by George Pór, Carlos García Timón, Fernanda Ibarra and John Lindsay.
- Social Capital Theory in the Context of Japanese Children, article by Cherylynn Bassani in electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies
- A Comparison of Social Capital Between Parents in Single and Two Parent Families in Japan,
- Five Dimensions of Social Capital Theory as they Pertain to Youth Studies, article by Cherylynn Bassani in the Journal of Youth Studies.
- Assist Social Capital, Working to Promote Best Practice in the Development of Social Capital
- Can Social Capital Explain Persistent Poverty Gaps? from the National Poverty Center
- Ethnicity as Social Capital
- Social Capital within Ethnic Communities
- Social capital, quality of life, and Internet and mobile phone use
- Collection of best Social Capital blogs by Heather Ross
- Video explanation of how social capital indexing powers citizen engagement
- Measuring social capital in a Philippine slum article by Petr Matous and Kazumasa Ozawa in the Journal of Field Methods
Evaluation, Feedback, and Reward of Individual Behavior. Review and Coursework Assignment Brief
Tutorials
Exercise
Readings
Cognitive Styles and Diversity: Personality Types. Male-female differences; mommy tracking; male-female differences according to Tannen
Tutorials
Readings
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of individuals. Personality types are sometimes distinguished from personality traits, with the latter embodying a smaller grouping of behavioral tendencies.[1] Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences between people, whereas traits might be construed as quantitative differences.[2] According to type theories, for example, introverts and extraverts are two fundamentally different categories of people. According to trait theories, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle.
External links
Communication: Male/Female conversation styles. Cultural differences.
Tutorials
Readings
Exercise
Recommended Texts
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Organizational
Theory, Design, and Change,
4/E Gareth R. Jones, Texas A&M University ISBN:
0-13-140371-0 Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.
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Liar's
Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop. |
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Talking
from 9 to 5 Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.
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Organisational
Behaviour, A Global Perspective,
3ed
Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop. |
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Organisational
Behaviour and Management With Organisational Behaviour and Management, students become involved participants in learning about behaviour and management within work settings. The book is designed with instructional flexibility in mind. OBM combines text, readings, self-learning exercises, group participation exercises, and cases. These elements are aimed at students interested in understanding, interpreting, and attempting to predict the behaviour of people working in organisations. Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop. |
Resources
- Why it's Important to Study Organizations
- Why study OB?
- What is OB?
- Coordination mechanisms
- Bases for Departmentation
- Communication Structure (Leavitt)
- Taylor's Scientific Management
- Fayol and the Classical School
- Weber and Bureaucracy
- Hawthorne Studies
- Introduction to Network Analysis
- Intra-Organizational Networks
- Organizational Theory: Determinants of Structure
- Trends in Organizational Structure
- Global trends
- The Mechanistic vs Organic Dimension
- Network Organizations
- Organizational Culture
- Org Culture w/ Examples from SB
- Cultural Differences
- Perception and Attribution
- Gender Diversity
- MBTI dimensions
- Notes on Teams
- Team Manual
- Dependency Theory
- Notes on Negotiation
- Notes on the Challenger Disaster
- Leadership
- Study Questions for the Final Exam